This is the fifth edition of a book I started writing in 1999, when I was
teaching at Colby College. I had taught an introductory computer science
class using the Java programming language, but I had not found a textbook
I was happy with. For one thing, they were all too big! There was no way my
students would read 800 pages of dense, technical material, even if I wanted
them to. And I didn’t want them to. Most of the material was too specific—
details about Java and its libraries that would be obsolete by the end of the
semester, and that obscured the material I really wanted to get to.
The other problem I found was that the introduction to object oriented
programming was too abrupt. Many students who were otherwise doing well
just hit a wall when we got to objects, whether we did it at the beginning,
middle or end.
So I started writing. I wrote a chapter a day for 13 days, and on the 14th
day I edited. Then I sent it to be photocopied and bound. When I handed it
out on the first day of class, I told the students that they would be expected
to read one chapter a week. In other words, they would read it seven times
slower than I wrote it.